Specifications

converter 1.5

2000 - 2005 urr Sound Technologies Inc.
88
My Roland MPU-401 (or compatible) isn’t found by converter!
This means you have specified the incorrect base address for the card in the
hardware.cfg
file.
Check your card’s jumper settings and/or try another address. If the base address setting in
hardware.cfg
is indeed correct, you may have another device installed in the computer which is
using the same address as your MPU-401 – try to identify what that piece of hardware would be, or
change the base address of your MPU-401 card to a different setting such as 300.
When I try to run converter, it crashes, and I know my soundcard isn’t the problem!
Make sure you have enough free memory available in the base 640k that DOS uses – you can check by
typing ‘mem’ at the DOS prompt. Memory above the base 640k is not directly available to converter, so
even if a computer has been expanded to 128MB of RAM, converter doesn’t make use of any of it
(ordinarily it hasn’t any need to). Since converter (and many other DOS-based applications) requires at
least 560k of free ram , it’s a good idea not to have a huge number of memory-resident software
running at the same time if they are taking up a significant amount of base memory, such as DOS cd-
rom drivers, EMM386, etc. A good workaround is to make a bootable floppy disk from which to run
converter.
When I try to run converter, I get a message saying “Program too big to fit in memory”
Make sure you have enough free conventional memory available to converter – at least 560k of the
base 640k of ram. It is best to not have EMM386 or some other protected mode driver loaded. Also, for
the mouse driver, try using the following command in the
autoexec.bat
file to load the mouse driver
into high memory:
loadhigh=mouse
When I try to run converter, it exits before anything happens, with the message “abnormal
program termination”. What gives?
This error is most likely caused by too little ‘base’ memory available for converter – for solutions, see the
answer to the previous question.
Why won’t converter run in a DOS shell under Windows?
During testing, it was found that converter didn’t function predictably when run in a DOS shell (DOS
prompt) under Windows9x. This is due to the fact that many of the computer’s built in devices are
controlled directly from converter itself, which interferes with Window’s controlling nature in regards to
hardware. Solution? Boot your machine into ‘pure’ DOS mode in one of several ways:
•
Re-boot your computer, press F8 as Windows9x begins to boot to bring up a ‘boot menu’, and
select ‘command prompt only’
•
create a bootable floppy and run converter from it (easy approach)
•
reboot your machine into pure DOS mode by clicking on the start menu and selecting shutdown,
and ‘Reboot into MS-DOS’. Note that this approach may not automatically run your
autoexec.bat
file, which may be needed if you are using a SoundBlaster or Gravis Ultrasound
card. If so, you can run the file yourself from the dos prompt by simply moving to your hard disk’s
root directory (ie.
c:\
) and typing
autoexec
followed by return.
Running converter in a DOS shell from within Windows9x would in effect reduce the benefits of it being
designed for DOS in the first place, as the additional weight of Windows running in the background
would significantly reduce converter’s realtime performance. For this reason, making it function properly
from within Windows is not a priority.